HFEPX · Eval paper review

Diagnosing and Mitigating Compounding Failures in Agentic Persuasion via Taxonomic Strategy Retrieval

Pradyumna Narayana, Sana Ayromlou, Purvi Sehgal

Published

Jun 23, 2026

Citations

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

10/100 (Low)

Extraction confidence

40% (Low)

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Rater population

Not reported

Signals refreshed

Jun 23, 2026

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Should you rely on this paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Low-signal caution for protocol decisions

Use this page for context, then validate protocol choices against stronger HFEPX references before implementation decisions.

The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.
The abstract does not clearly name benchmarks or metrics.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

What to verify

Read the full paper before copying any benchmark, metric, or protocol choices.

Main weakness

The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.

Human feedback signal

Not explicit

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation signal

Detected

Eval setup described

Usefulness for eval research

10/100

Adjacent candidate

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here

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Abstract

Foundation-model agents in multi-step, open-ended environments frequently suffer from compounding errors, where early mistakes contaminate long-horizon trajectories. While Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) succeeds in deterministic domains, agents in subjective tasks like persuasion experience severe problem drift and sycophantic conformity. We identify semantic leakage in standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) as a reproducible trigger for these failures, as standard RAG prioritizes vocabulary overlap over logical necessity. To eliminate this leakage, we introduce Taxonomic Strategy RAG (TS-RAG), a systems intervention that routes strategies through a discrete categorical bottleneck to decouple argumentative structure from topical content. Zero-shot, cross-domain evaluations demonstrate that TS-RAG significantly improves the transfer of abstract logic where standard semantic retrieval collapses. Crucially, TS-RAG acts as a "capability bridge" in asymmetric deployments, empowering lightweight persuaders to consistently defeat parametrically superior opponents (improving win rates from 70.5 to 78.5) and accelerating argumentative efficiency. Finally, we introduce trace-level diagnostics via a turn-by-turn Debate State Representation (DSR), demonstrating the necessity of strict constraints to prevent evaluation collapse via default agentic sycophancy.

What we could verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.